How much time do faculty surgeons from UT Southwestern Medical Center spend in the operating room when supervising doctors in training? Parkland Memorial Hospital officials won't say.

Time records are confidential under state law, according to Parkland, because they're used in the medical peer review process.

However, the hospital inadvertently released a nurse's record of how long Dr. Frank Gottschalk, a UT Southwestern faculty physician, was present during a February 2009 wound-cleaning surgery on Jessie Mae Ned: 19 minutes of a 67-minute operation.

"I was present for, and supervised all significant portions of this procedure," said a separate surgery procedure note bearing what appeared to be Gottschalk's signature.

The time he wrote on the document was 11:30 a.m. That was 11 minutes before the procedure started, according to nursing records.

Other insight comes from a 2008 memo Parkland sent to federal health regulators, who had flagged five surgeries and questioned whether residents, as trainee doctors are known, were properly supervised when performing them.

In three of the five, nurses documented that faculty doctors were present all or almost all of the time, according to the memo.

But in a fourth case, the faculty supervisor left a brain surgery almost two hours before it ended, the memo indicated.

And in a fifth, Parkland said its records conflicted on whether an OB-GYN doctor had overseen an ear surgery.

The regulators ended their inquiry after Parkland presented the memo and what it called "compelling evidence," including notes signed by faculty surgeons and nurses' electronically recorded observations of when those doctors were in the operating room.

The Dallas Morning News obtained a copy of the memo with all names and underlying evidence redacted. It was written by Michael Silhol, whom Parkland - for reasons it won't explain - recently paid a year's salary to quit as the hospital's top lawyer.